I was thinking of doing the same and priced it all up, but it wasn't going to be much of a saving. Anyway, I've just found out we have ADSL2 now in Warsop and phoned BT to find out why I was only getting 6 mb speeds. It seems I needed to renew my contract with them, even though I've been with them forever! So why didn't they tell me?. I was paying £41 per month but from today I'm only paying £26.90 and I'm getting ADSL2.

I've always been happy with the service from BT, even though they don't let me know when upgrades are available. My big gripe with them is that they use foreign call centres and I can't always understand the person on the other end and explaining to them is like pulling teeth. When I have on occassions spoken to someone in a British call centre, I've always had good results and they've been quick to offer me good refunds when things have gone wrong.

I've been generally happy with Sky TV, though I've had a few wrangles with them and it seems to take them an age to get things sorted and they want to charge for absolutely everything. My concern about having Broadband from them is that they'd still be using a BT line and my experience of third party services is that each blames the other when things go wrong and you get passed from pillar to post passing messages from one to the other, because they never to talk to each other.

I'm seriously thinking of cancelling my Sky subscription to cut costs now that I'm not earning.

Yes, that's right! Line rental, free calls and ADSL2 all included in the price, though they did do me a special price for staying with them - a loyalty bonus they call it but out of earshot they probably call it a 'get that woman out of my hair pay off'.

I usually find they can better a price if they think they're going to lose you as a customer.

I've stuck them out before when my sky box broke and they've wanted to charge me for an engineer to come out. I told them not to bother and they could just cancel my subscription. They sent me an engineer and a new box free of charge. The next time it went, I phoned and said, my sky box has packed up, it's out of warrenty, I know you'll want to charge me for an engineer and when I tell you to cancel my subscription, you'll offer to send someone free of charge. So let's not mess around, just send an engineer and a new box. The operator just laughed and agreed.

Something similar happened with BT. We were paying more money for less service and I told the operator I was considering going to Sky to make it cheaper. That's how I ended up getting a decent discount.